Down to the Woods: DI Helen Grace 8 (Detective Inspector Helen Grace)

by M. J. Arlidge

  When that moment came, Helen wanted both her DSs by her side.

  103

  She stood alone, cloaked in darkness.

  Her conversation with Matteo Dominici had taken longer than usual – she had laboured to placate him, to no effect – and by the time she left, there was no point heading back to base. Instead, she had driven straight to their forensic base in Woolston, dropping off Dominici’s DNA sample personally. She wouldn’t normally have done this – that kind of job was the preserve of a junior officer or, failing that, a courier. But such was the importance of a quick answer that she’d decided to transport it herself – if Dominici was not the father of Scott’s baby, then a whole new line of enquiry would suddenly open up.

  Now, however, she regretted her selfless diligence. It had kept her at work later than usual and she hadn’t arrived home until just before nine. She had called prior to that, hoping to say goodnight to Jessica, to test the water with Steve, but her calls had been ignored. Was this done to punish her? To make a point? Or was it entirely innocent, Steve too caught up with Jessica to notice his buzzing phone? Charlie didn’t know which and it unnerved her.

  Opening the front door, she had stepped inside to find the house quiet and still. The hall light wasn’t on, nor were the lights in the kitchen and living room. The usual happy buzz of their cosy downstairs space was entirely absent. In fact, the whole house felt cold and unwelcoming tonight.

  Quietly mounting the stairs, Charlie started to panic. It wasn’t possible that Steve had left, was it? Taking Jessica with him? No, that was crazy. Cresting the stairs, she was reassured to see Jessica’s door just ajar, the warm glow of her night light emanating from within. Steve would never do something so dramatic, so underhand. He might be difficult, but he was open and honest, even when furious with her. Besides, they weren’t at that stage yet, were they?

  Tip-toeing past Jessica’s door, she crept into their bedroom. Steve was there, which was a relief, but he appeared to be asleep. The curtains were drawn, the duvet was up around his chin, his face turned away from her.

  ‘Steve?’

  No movement. Not even a change in his breathing.

  ‘Steve, are you awake? I’m sorry I’m late …’

  She petered out, knowing she wouldn’t get a response. Either he was asleep and she was wasting her breath or he was still too angry to talk. Either way, it was a depressing state of affairs. She had so much she needed to tell Steve – from the exhilaration of their new lead to her distressing interview with Matteo Dominici. She wanted to have a glass of wine, to share her anxieties, to ask for a hug. But she would get none of these tonight – for the first time in ages she felt unwelcome in her own home.

  Easing herself onto her bed, she pulled one boot off, then the other. Her left ankle was throbbing again – the swelling around her injury resolutely refusing to ease – and she felt dog tired. Perhaps she was getting old, but she had seldom felt this wrung out during a case. All she wanted to do now was sleep, to snuggle down in her bed and pretend for a few glorious hours that all was well in the world. Sliding off her shirt, trousers and underwear, she threw on her pyjamas, eager for the oblivion of sleep. But even as she lifted up the duvet, a terrified scream rang out from Jessica’s bedroom.

  There would be no sleep tonight.

  104

  His eyes roamed the gloomy woodland, searching for signs of life. Yet again the police search teams had been active, delving ever deeper into the forest, penetrating its hidden corners. They were getting better at the task – they were more circumspect now, more observant, their progress less crashing – yet they still had little chance of catching him. Nathaniel Martin had lived in the forest for eighteen months now and there was not a sound, not a cry, call or creak, that he did not recognize. Six officers moving in unison were thus easy to detect. He could hear them at half a mile’s distance, maybe more, ensuring that he could be long gone by the time they stumbled upon his latest hiding place.

  The teams had dogs now, which made things more complicated. They were no doubt using items from his former camp to give the dogs his scent and they had proved adept at following it. To counter this worrying development, Martin had started coating his clothes in foul-smelling mud, rotting flora, even fox faeces, but even these pungent additions couldn’t conceal his presence. Had the police let their dogs off the leash, let them run free, then they might have caught him by now, but, thankfully, this was not how search parties worked. They kept their Alsatians on tight leads, tempering the zeal of their charges. As a result, progress was slow, giving Martin ample time to vanish.

  This was his life now, remaining vigilant from dawn until dusk, day after day. And he would have been comfortable with that, maintaining an itinerant lifestyle, until his pursuers finally called off the hunt and the forest became his once more. But the forest wasn’t his any more and he feared it might never be so again. Not while evil continued to hold sway.

  Having spent a year and a half in glorious isolation, emerging only to ward off those who threatened the forest’s existence, Nathaniel Martin now felt beset on all sides. First it had been the builders, developers and holiday-makers. Then the police, journalists, even the occasional gang of high-spirited teenagers, daring each other to enter the dangerous forest. And circling them was the quarry they were all seeking, a fleeting, malevolent spirit, who had brought death and disquiet to Nathaniel Martin’s sanctuary. Martin had not seen him in the flesh yet, but he had felt his malign presence. And he had witnessed his handiwork – two dead ponies, mercilessly butchered and left to rot. The sight of the dead horses – beautiful, even when contorted by rigor mortis – had nearly broken his heart.

  Was he at large tonight? Was his bloodlust about to stain the forest once again? Martin kept perfectly still, his eyes darting here and there, seeking out his sinister form in the bushes, the foliage, the long, dark shadows. He couldn’t see anything untoward, any sign that he was abroad, but that didn’t mean much. He hadn’t seen anything those other nights either, when he took the lives of four innocent beings, before vanishing once more. Who’s to say he wasn’t out there right now, watching him?

  The thought made Nathaniel Martin feel distinctly uneasy. Previously master of his destiny, unofficial king of this vast wilderness, now he was on the back foot as never before, surviving by his wits alone. This forest had been his friend, his salvation, but it was no longer safe. It seemed impossible, but it was true. His new Eden had become a place of darkness.

  105

  The morning sun crept through the grimy windows illuminating the still figure of Helen Grace. She was standing in front of the murder board, staring at the faces arrayed in front of her. At the bottom were Nathaniel Martin and Dean Clarke and, above them, Tom Campbell and Lauren Scott, flanked by Matteo Dominici and Melanie Walton. Helen’s eyes flitted between the latter quartet, as if seeking hidden connections, but their faces stared back at her, enigmatic and lifeless.

  She turned slowly to take in another set of faces. The team were assembled, crowding around her in a crescent shape, curious to know why they had been summoned to an early meeting. Helen had been standing in front of the board when they first started arriving, some of them no doubt wondering if she had been there all night. They were right, she had, grabbing a couple of hours’ sleep on her sofa, before changing, washing and starting again.

  Helen felt sure that answers were under her nose, but still she struggled to see a clear picture. And her mood had not been helped by an early-morning call from the Police Service Laboratory in Woolston.

  ‘So I got the results of the DNA tests this morning,’ she announced to the assembled officers. ‘Matteo Dominici is the father of Lauren Scott’s baby.’

  There were mild groans from the team.

  ‘This doesn’t mean anything per se. She might still have been having an affair with Campbell or have renewed her friendship with him. Where are we at with potential crossovers?’

  ‘Very little so far
,’ DC Osbourne replied, trying not to sound too downbeat.

  ‘What does very little mean?’

  ‘It means … nothing. We’ve not found any evidence that they were in contact by phone or electronic media, nor that they met in person. We’ve checked their movements – both on their phone diaries and on what CCTV we have available – and there’s no correlation at all. Campbell rarely ventured into Southampton itself – he commuted between Winchester and Lyndhurst and that was it. Lauren frequented Thornhill and Woolston, where she had a job in Boots. Other than that, she made occasional trips to the city centre to go shopping, but they were brief visits and seem to tally with card transactions at H&M, Primark, Tesco’s.’

  ‘What about their internet searches?’ Helen demanded.

  ‘We checked out their phones, tablets and laptops,’ Reid responded briskly. ‘There’s no history of either of them Googling each other’s names, personal details etc. They obviously weren’t Facebook friends and, in fact, no friend requests were ever sent. They appeared to be unaware of each other, despite their relative proximity.’

  ‘What about links to other folk she might have known from that time?’

  ‘DC Edwards and I went over that again this morning,’ Charlie said, swallowing a yawn. ‘Campbell kept up with a couple of people from his university days – a friend from the tennis team who now lives in Singapore and a fellow history student who lives in the West Midlands, but contact is intermittent at best.’

  ‘And Scott?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Edwards spoke up. ‘No contact with anyone from that time.’

  ‘What about the calls from the cloned phone? Could they have been from an old acquaintance?’

  ‘Possibly,’ DC Edwards replied. ‘But the call pattern doesn’t suggest Campbell or Scott were kindly disposed to the caller.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning the caller always contacted them, never the other way around. The first couple of times Campbell accepted the calls, then thereafter they go to voicemail, judging by the duration of the connection. And it’s the same with Scott. She accepted the first call, then she lets the subsequent ones divert. Numerous calls go unanswered and there’s never any attempt to return them.’

  ‘So the calls weren’t welcome? Were even threatening perhaps?’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Edwards agreed.

  There was a murmur of excitement from the team.

  ‘How are we doing with the trace?’ Helen persisted. ‘Is the phone still active?’

  ‘It’s still used, but is only on for a minute or so at a time, and then only once or twice a day,’ Hudson added. ‘No obvious links to a residential address, hotel or hostel. DC Osbourne is pulling together a site map of the connections to see if we can identify any clusters or patterns of movement.’

  ‘Quick as you can, please,’ Helen encouraged. ‘In the meantime, we need to go back over Campbell’s and Scott’s movements, spending patterns, communications, everything, to see if we can find any correlation – any marked response – to those calls. We need to know why they were made, what their purpose was and how – if – they impacted on Campbell and Scott. Above all …’ Helen paused, before concluding: ‘… we need to find out who was making those calls.’

  106

  His eyes stole over the text, drinking in the details. He’d read all the local coverage and had now moved on to the nationals, snaffling a discarded copy of the Daily Mirror from a nearby table. Unsurprisingly, the paper had devoted four pages to the New Forest killings, rehashing all the known facts, but also breaking the news that two dead ponies had been discovered in the forest. They had gone into great detail about the bolts that were found in them, not to mention the advanced state of their decomposition, while modestly refusing to publish photos that were available on the internet, but ‘unfit for a family newspaper’. It would have made him laugh, in other circumstances.

  Turning the page, he came face to face with Lauren Scott, her coy blue eyes glancing at him through her fringe. He had always found her beguiling and he felt those familiar stirrings now, even though this morning her pretty face was framed by tragedy. According to the horrified journalist, Lauren had been pregnant, a fact that seemed to have created a sea change in the way her death was being reported. Whereas previously the tabloids had majored on her drug abuse and troubled family life, now they were busy making her into a saint. The one person you’re never supposed to harm is a pregnant woman.

  Turning the page, he now found himself pitched into celebrity news – more bed hopping at a Premiership football club – so quickly doubled back to the slaughtered ponies. As he did so, he glanced up, to find the café owner staring directly at him. For a moment, he froze, the page lingering half turned, then quickly resumed his reading, dropping his eyes to the paper.

  The place had been busy when he entered and he had been able to eat a decent meal and digest his paper in relative anonymity. Now, however, the café was thinning out and he was more visible, attracting the attention of the owner who clearly didn’t like the fact that he had been sitting there for over an hour, hogging a table for four. He looked like he was about to make a move, to come over and challenge him, but there was no question of that. It would be crazy to linger, to excite attention, so slipping the newspaper inside his coat, he rose and hurried from the café, watched every step of the way.

  107

  ‘This’ll be the death of us, all of us. You put that in your newspaper.’

  Nigel Robinson jabbed his finger in the air as he spoke, forcing Emilia to take a step backwards. The campsite owner’s blood was up this morning, and she could understand why, but she wasn’t prepared to sustain an injury on the back of his righteous indignation. She valued herself a little more than that.

  The truth was she didn’t even want to be here, going over old ground by talking to the desperate owner of the Woodland View campsite, but there was a troubling lack of developments in the investigation – no new arrests, no new leads, no new bodies, nothing to feed the frenzy of interest this case had aroused. News that Lauren Scott had been pregnant had created a stir yesterday, but for once Emilia had been behind the beat on that one, Spivack presumably having kept that little nugget to himself to sell to the tabloids. She would have to have a word with him about that.

  They desperately needed something new to say. Only a handful of hardy souls were heading to the New Forest these days – for obvious reasons – so there didn’t seem to be any major threat to the public, disappointingly. And they had mined pretty much everything there was to say about the private lives of the victims, baby aside, but Gardiner had not wanted to go too large on this for fear of upsetting their readers. Stumped for other angles, they had opted for the devastating effect of the case on local businesses. It wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t original, but at least it was relevant, providing an insight into Hampshire life which the nationals couldn’t hope to rival.

  ‘The longer this case goes on, the longer the killer remains at large, the worse it’ll be for people like me. It’s not just my own future I’m thinking about. I employ people, lots of people. If I go under, what’ll happen to them?’

  Emilia nodded sympathetically, only half listening. Normally she would record an interview like this, but she knew exactly what Robinson was going to say before he said it. His pompous indignation and outrage were utterly predictable – even if she couldn’t remember his exact quotes, she could make up something suitable. As he spoke, she was already composing the articles in her head. Five hundred words, full of alarm and anxiety, painting a worrying picture of the future for local businesses and the New Forest leisure scene. Who would want to go tramping through the forest now when you might stumble upon a crime scene? There would be the odd ghoul of course, plus those who were too ignorant or uninterested to follow the news, but Emilia suspected most campers would opt for Dorset for now.

  Robinson was in full flow, berating the police, the council, Visit Hampshire and any other local body he co
uld think of. Emilia pretended to jot down his thoughts dutifully, but she was, in fact, doodling. She already had the shape of her article mapped out and her thoughts had now started to drift to Graham Ross.

  She had sent him a thank you text this morning, adding that she would like to meet up again soon. So far, she had had nothing back. He might be working of course, but still his silence unnerved her. She needed his insight, and possibly those photos he’d held back, but she was also thinking of bigger things. A book on the current case perhaps, even a retrospective of Ross’s life in crime, incorporating his amazing treasure trove of images. The opportunities were there for the taking, if he was prepared to play ball. But would he? This was what continued to exercise Emilia, even as Nigel Robinson droned on in front of her.

  Would Ross go on record about the killings? Allow her to use his insights about the staging of the murders? Even consider some kind of joint venture? It was a tantalizing prospect, but one which lay just out of reach. She knew nothing about this man or his motives, nor what it would take to seduce him.

  Who exactly was the mysterious Graham Ross?

  108

  ‘What have you got on Campbell’s movements?’

  Helen and Charlie were hunkered down in her office. While Joseph Hudson was trying to locate a new signal from the unregistered phone, they were busy probing ever deeper into the lives of their victims. Having already sifted their personal lives to exhaustion, exploring past and present relationships with lovers, friends and family, they were now drilling down into their movements. Where they went, who they saw, how they reacted to these mystery calls.